Russian airstrikes vital for peace in Syria, Assad says

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad insisted that Russia’s daily airstrikes in Syria are essential to securing peace in the Middle East during a Sunday interview on Iranian TV.

Russian Federation has said it would step up its offensive in Syria, escalating the military intervention Moscow launched on Wednesday to weaken Islamic State militants.

One person was killed and others wounded, it said.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement circulated by supporters on Twitter.

For the fifth day in a row, Russian Federation said it has been carrying out bombings against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, but critics in the West said the strikes are mainly targeting moderate opponents of Assad.

He called on Western countries, which have along with Gulf allies carried out air strikes on IS in Syria since September 2014, to join forces in order to fight extremism. Failure would mean that “we face the destruction of the whole region,” he said.

“The chances of this alliance’s success are big, not small”, Assad said.

“It remains my hope that Vladimir Putin will see that tethering Russian Federation to a sinking ship is a losing strategy, and will decide to confront the threat presented by (IS) instead of continuing its unilateral airstrikes against Assad’s opposition“. “Consequently, destroying terrorism is the foundation of any action in Syria”. “Recent reports out of Moscow claim that the Russian Air Force completed more than two dozen bombing missions in Syria within just two days last week”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors Syria’s four-year-old civil war through a network of sources, said Russian planes struck on Sunday in Homs province and also in neighbouring Hama.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Monday it had made 25 flights in Syria in the previous 24 hours, hitting nine Islamic State targets.

On Saturday, Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, speaking to the Saudi-funded Al-Arabiya television channel, likewise said the Russian airstrikes were meant to “combat terrorism“.

Flynn added that “we have to go after these radical elements wherever they exist, instead of allowing them to come back and roost in our own countries”.

Efforts to find a political solution to the civil war have so far proven fruitless, with most rebel fighters demanding Assad’s departure as a precondition for talks. He said that before Russian Federation began air operations, “American experts informed us that there was nobody but terrorists in the district”. Trump’s suggestion that murderous dictators Saddam Hussein, Moammar Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad might best have been left in power is so at odds with current US policy, and so in line with Putin’s worldview, that getting his comments into the public realm was plainly a high priority. Assad noted that war in his country will continue as long as “certain” governments push ahead with their support for terrorists.